Building an XT-IDE card kit – flash storage for classic PC’s!

Watch me build an XT-IDE kit from Glitchworks designed to give modern storage options to the IBM PC (and XT), then test it out and hopefully get it running! The original PC and XT had an MFM storage interface and an 8 bit ISA bus; the IDE interface was only available for 16 bit ISA and later. This card adds the ability to use more modern options like flash storage to boot an original PC, which has the side benefit of allowing the download and loading of early PC software from a modern PC onto the 5150 and 5160.

This is partially a soldering video, but I do show the card in action as well!

Updated 8/15: I mentioned in the video that I’d give a little more detail on how I had to get the card working. At this point, I have DOS 5.0 booting on the card with a full 256MB partition. What I first had to do was fully clean the card using diskpart’s clean command and a total MBR wipe using DOS debug. This part you can do in a VM. Then I was able to fdisk, format /s and install DOS 3.2 from actual floppy disk on the 5150 (disks I already had) to create something at least readable by both the 5150 and a Windows 10 PC. I then used that to transfer DOS 5.0 disk images from my modern PC to the 5150, and I used dskimage.exe to extract them to actual floppies. Then I booted DOS 5.0 from my new floppies, exited out, used fdisk to delete the non-DOS partition, cleaned the card yet again (probably a little redundant but I wanted to be safe), then booted from floppy again and went through the regular DOS 5.0 setup (including creating a new partition). Then the card worked and now has DOS 5 on it, with full use of the card. Bottom line is, as far as I can tell, you really need to install DOS from physical floppies. (An emulator should work too, but they’re not easy to get working on a 5150 either.)